Housing Density Lecture Series – After the Tenements: Out or Up in the 1920s?

This discussion among urban and housing historians Richard Plunz, James Sanders, and Carol Willis will consider the early 20th-century alternative models of decentralizing the dense tenement districts of the Lower East Side through the construction of garden apartments in the boroughs or by the short-lived trend in the late 1920s to erect skyscraper complexes such as Tudor City and London Terrace in Manhattan. We posit: Could housing reformers and private development have replaced crowded tenement districts with high-density, high-rise housing communities?

Richard Plunz is Professor of Architecture at Columbia GSAPP, where he has served as Chair of the Division of Architecture, Director of the Urban Design Program, and currently, as Director of the Urban Design Lab, a research unit of Columbia University’s Earth Institute. His classic volume A History of Housing in New York City (Columbia 1992) was published in a revised edition in 2016.

James Sanders, an architect, filmmaker, and author of numerous books, including Celluloid Skyline: New York and the Movies. With Ric Burns, he co-wrote the Emmy Award-winning PBS series New York: A Documentary Film and its companion volume, New York: An Illustrated History. Among other projects, he serves as a Senior Fellow at Columbia University’s Center for Urban Real Estate (CURE), developing an initiative that explores the impact of tech culture and industry on the planning and urbanism of New York and other global cities.

Reservations are required, and priority is given to Members and Corporate Member firms and their employees. All guests MUST RSVP to programs@skyscraper.org to assure admittance to the event.

More information on the Museum’s ongoing exhibition “Housing Density: Tenements to Towers,” which is the base for this lecture series, can be found at skyscraper.org/housingdensity.